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Improper Neutralization of Special Elements used in an OS Command ('OS Command Injection')

CVE-2019-12709

Medium
6.7/10

Summary

A vulnerability in a CLI command related to the virtualization manager (VMAN) in Cisco IOS XR Software for Cisco ASR 9000 Series Aggregation Services Routers could allow an authenticated, local attacker to execute arbitrary commands on the underlying Linux operating system with root privileges. The vulnerability is due to insufficient validation of arguments passed to a specific VMAN CLI command on an affected device. An attacker who has valid administrator access to an affected device could exploit this vulnerability by including malicious input as the argument of an affected command. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to run arbitrary commands on the underlying operating system with root privileges, which may lead to complete system compromise.

  • LOW
  • LOCAL
  • HIGH
  • UNCHANGED
  • NONE
  • HIGH
  • HIGH
  • HIGH

CWE-78 - OS Command Injection

The OS command injection weakness (also known as shell injection) is a vulnerability which enables an attacker to run arbitrary OS commands on a server. This is done by modifying the intended downstream OS command and injecting arbitrary commands, enabling the execution of unauthorized OS commands. This has the potential to fully compromise the application along with all of its data, and, if the compromised process does not follow the principle of least privileges, it may compromise other parts of the hosting infrastructure as well. This weakness is listed as number ten in the 'CWE Top 25 Most Dangerous Software Weaknesses'.

References

Advisory Timeline

  • Published